Thursday, May 24, 2007

ANNOUNCEMENT 1: “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots” is now available.

Go to Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, tsup.truman.edu or www.jasonoffutt.com to order a book Loyd Auerbach, author of “A Paranormal Casebook: Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium,” calls “a great book of hauntings, well-researched and fun to read;” and Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of “The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits” calls “an engaging read from start to finish, and an invaluable resource for every paranormal collection.”

The book will also be available at Barnes and Noble, Borders or Books-A-Million stores in Missouri after May 28.

I’d like to thank all of you for your e-mails of support for my book and my blog. They’ve meant a lot to me.

ANNOUNCEMENT 2: The following is a list of book signings and radio interviews scheduled throughout the summer. This list, I hope, will grow.

June 2: Hannibal book signing. Details at www.rockcliffemansion.com/special_events.shtml.

June 4: Radio interview on World of the Unexplained from 7 to 9 p.m. Go to www.worldoftheunexplained.com for more details and to listen live, or to find the archive (uh, later, of course).

June 23: Book signing at the Ray County Library, Richmond, Mo., 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Go to http://raycountylibrary.homestead.com/index.html for details (soon. The event isn’t yet posted).

June 29: Book signing at Borders in St. Joseph, Mo., 6 p.m.

June 30: Book signing at the Jesse James Farm near Kearney, Mo., 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

July 6: Book signings at Downtown Book and Toy, Jefferson City, Mo., from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., and at Sedalia Book and Toy, Sedalia, Mo., 4 to 6 p.m.

July 21: Book signing at Pythian Castle, Springfield, Mo. Details at www.pythiancastle.com.

July 29: Radio interview on Ghostly Talk from 5:30 to 6 p.m. Listen live at www.ghostlytalk.com.

Other events are in the works. Stay tuned.

ANNOUNCEMENT 3: This blog is going on hiatus for a few months. With all the promotion for “Haunted Missouri,” and the research and writing for my next book of paranormal stories, I have to take a break. Fresh “From the Shadows” entries will resume this fall. Stay tuned!

But, please, if you have any stories of the paranormal, let me know. Even though I’m taking a break from this blog, I’m still writing the book; your stories will be welcomed. I can always be reached at jasonoffutt@hotmail.com.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Author’s note: After the recent “From the Shadows” detailing Kansan Randy Harrington’s Bigfoot encounter in southern Oklahoma, others have come forward with their sightings. Here is one such encounter.

Tall, straight pine trees cover portions of southern Oklahoma and northeast Texas. These woods are home to mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and an animal that is still in the realm of legend – except to those who have seen it.

Randy was on leave from the Navy and went home to Hugo, Okla. He and his girlfriend went on a date.

“We went to Spencerville Crossing about 15 miles northeast of Hugo,” he said. “We went there to swim and picnic and we stayed there pretty late.”

Spencerville Crossing is now under the waters of the man-made Hugo Lake, but in 1961 it was a popular swimming hole.

“We were coming back from that area, going south on Highway 93,” he said. “It was about 2 to 2:30 in the morning about 8 miles from Hugo, that’s when I saw this Bigfoot.”

Ray was driving his girlfriend home when the headlights of his car struck a creature standing in the highway.

“He was standing upright in the middle of the highway on the yellow strip,” Ray said. “He was standing upright on two legs. And, as I got closer to him, his head was turned toward my car – I didn’t stop.” Ray paused to laugh. “I was probably doing 30 to 40 (mph). When I got next to him he looked right at me.”

The creature didn’t move as Ray passed.

“I passed right by it on the driver’s side,” Ray said. “It stood there. It didn’t run. When it saw me coming it looked at me. It did not run off the highway, like he might have seen cars before. He wasn’t scared of the vehicle.”

The Bigfoot was smaller than the usually reported 7- to 8-feet tall, 450-pound creatures. Ray said it was about the height of his car, about five feet.

“It might not have been full grown. It could have been a smaller one,” Ray said. “The hair was brown, but its facial features didn’t have hair.”

The one part of its face Ray could make out as he drove past was its nose.

“It had a nose, but it seemed like it wasn’t like a gorilla,” he said. “It seemed like it wasn’t as wide.”

He turned around to make another pass by the creature, but it was gone. He took his girlfriend home, then went to tell his family.

“Nobody believed me,” he said. “They were saying you probably saw a monkey.”

The winter quarters of a local circus nearby, but Ray’s positive he didn’t see a monkey.

“When you see something you’ve never seen before it really scares you,” Ray said. “The closer I got the more scared I became. I had goose bumps come up on my arms. It wasn’t a monkey.”

The term Bigfoot wasn’t used in Oklahoma in 1961, but that doesn’t mean people hadn’t seen one. It was called things like Hairy Man, Big Ed, the Green Hill Monster, and Chicken Man.

“They called it the Chicken Man. It was stealing chickens,” Ray said. “They didn’t call it Bigfoot.”

Recent Bigfoot sightings in this area include a fall 1995 sighting in Choctaw County near Soper, Okla., an Oct. 30, 2002 sighting in Choctaw County near Sawyer, Okla., a Aug. 5, 2004 encounter near a hunting cabin in the Arbuckle Mountains and occasional sightings in nearby Lamar County, Texas.

Ray, however, has kept his encounter quiet, until now.

“I’ve told my family about it and bored my wife with it,” Ray said. “But I’ve never told anyone else. This is the first time I’ve really told anyone my story.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason's book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849 or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

The strange and unnerving are universal. Separated by languages and oceans, people from across the world have experienced similar visits from things they can’t explain.

Greg Keskinen is an American who has lived in Tokyo for almost four years.

“I’ve found that quite a few people here are able to see ghosts or spirits,” he said. “In the States, I never met even one person who had seen an apparition, but here, I’ve met over 10 so far.”

Some of the encounters include a woman seeing a man dressed in samurai armor standing in her home, a nurse who often sees shadow people in a hospital, and a friend who saw an angel.

“My coworker, Tokiko, sees ghosts often, and once saw an ‘angel,’” Greg said. “A beautiful woman dressed in shining white, who was scattering a golden, glittering dust in the air. … It seems to me that Japan is quite a goldmine of strangeness.”

A “From the Shadows” reader in Stockholm, Sweden has also seen a ghost in her home – but her experience was a little too personal for comfort.

Fatima-Zohraa Tribak, 39, was cooking dinner when she realized she was not alone.

“It all started in the middle of the day,” she said. “I tried to turn a lid that didn’t want to open. I remember I was thinking, ‘now it would have been nice to have a strong man helping me.’”

The lid wouldn’t budge. She placed the unopened can on the counter and started preparing something else.

“I gave up trying to open the can and I turned my back on it,” she said. “Then I heard ‘click,’ but I didn’t care because I had something cooking on the stove. I just thought that it was the food cooking making the sound. And then I turned around and what I saw made me jump.”

The lid was lying next to the can.

“I thought it was a good helping spirit, so I said ‘thank you’ out loud,” she said. “And then I felt stupid and started to try to think of a good natural explanation for what happened.”

Later that evening, she was getting ready for sleep when her ‘good helping spirit’ visited again.

“I had been in the bathroom and was walking out. I turned the light out and started to walk towards my bedroom,” she said. “For some reason I looked into a big mirror and I saw a shadow shaped like a man. I thought to myself, ‘what is making this shadow look like this in the hall?’”

In the mirror, the shadow was accompanied by a light … a light she had turned out.

“I turned around and the light in the hall was still turned out, so there was nothing I could see there,” she said. “I was still looking into the dark when I thought I must have been mistaken of what I saw.”

She wasn’t.

“I turned around to go to my bed and I looked into my big mirror again to make sure I was wrong from the start,” she said, but what she saw terrified her. “There the light was and the man again. This time I ran into my bedroom and I jumped up on my bed shaking. I’m a 39-year-old woman, but I felt like a small girl at this moment.”

She’s seen the apparition since this encounter – as recently as April, “but this time it moved” – and, although the figure has never harmed her, she’s worried it might.

“I have tried to find out if this is something I should be scared of or if I can relax,” she said. “I didn’t know where I should go to ask someone without them thinking that I’m crazy. I feel quite silly. But in the same way I’m thinking, why should I feel silly? I really would like to know what this is. Is it something in my mind, or is it something real?”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849 or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

A woman with the head of a goat. A spectral hitchhiker. Red eyes that stare at passersby from the dead, black windows of abandoned buildings.

This is the legend of Windyville, Mo.

“Visitors have reported screams from the old cannery building, and a horseback rider was spotted at Lone Rock Cemetery. It’s also home to spiritual cults, so watch out,” proclaimed an Oct. 20, 2005 article in USA Today.

Sounds like a great place to hunt ghosts, right? Not really.

Ronnie Powell lives in Windyville, a town many sites on the Internet say is a ghost town. It’s not. The town was once home to a tomato cannery, grocery store, post office and a number of families. The buildings are still there, but the businesses aren’t, and only four or five houses are occupied.

The population of Windyville grows, however, when ghost hunters are in town.

“(These) people came to Windyville and they pilfered, they broke into buildings, they had rituals, and it got so bad that we got the law to get rid of most of them,” he said. “They told them not to come back.”

Ronnie, who retired after 30 years with the Missouri Department of Conservation, has always liked to write and once penned a few Windyville ghost stories for “More Missouri Ghosts,” by Joan Gilbert. He wrote the stories as fiction but they were published as fact. Although the stories were left out of the next edition of the book, they’d already hit the Internet.

“I know (the trouble) is all because of me and my stories,” he said. “‘The Ghosts of Windyville’ was just tidbits of things that I couldn’t corroborate. They were just stories. I sure did ruin Windyville. ”

Ghost hunters and the curious have vandalized the buildings, trespassed and terrorized the few residents of the town.

“The stories I could write about the ghost hunters would be better than the ghost stories,” Ronnie said. “They wouldn’t want people looking in their windows.”

Although people have trespassed around his home, nothing bothered him as badly as the Goths.

“They had some kind of a fire ritual down here,” he said. “I ran them off. They all ganged up around me. I told them I was armed and they scattered. They were dancing around a fire and were chanting and all that. One man had a knife. I saw that.”

The School of Metaphysics in Windyville probably hasn’t helped the town’s reputation.

“They picked Windyville as the ninth (most haunted) place,” Dr. Barbara Condron of the School of Metaphysics said of the USA Today article. “They picked dead places. Windyville isn’t dead.”

The school, which has 15 branches throughout the Midwest, focuses on channeling the mind’s energy in positive ways and learning how to co-exist with your fellow man – but the locals don’t always view it that way.

“We’re kind of the talk of the high school here,” Barbara said. “A lot of times we get joke calls. ‘Ah, yes, you guys move things with your mind out there?’ It’s the Uri Geller bending spoons thing. It hasn’t been good.”

And the school has experienced trespassing and vandalism, too; much like a recent incident.

“Two guys who graduated Lebanon high school were going to chain our gate to their pickup, tear it down and drag it down the road,” Barbara said. “They were fortunately caught by local authorities.”

The nature of the School of Metaphysics calls for thinking positively. The school rarely prosecutes – it didn’t in this case – and Barbara said she doesn’t think the kids from Lebanon will come back.

“It’s one thing to do it in the night time and another to look the people in the eye the next day,” she said. “It’s the golden rule in Christianity. You treat people the way you want to be treated. I hope it heals.”

Today, the Windyville ghost stories remain on dozens of ghost hunter Web sites, which means Windyville may not be off the paranormal map anytime soon.

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is coming in May. FREE SHIPPING when you order online at: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

About Me

Jason Offutt is a syndicated columnist, author, college journalism instructor, and fan of all things strange. His books about the paranormal, "Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters," "What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal In Your Backyard," "Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us," and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” are available at www.amazon.com.
Jason is available for interviews, speaking engagements and beer festivals. E-mail all serious inquiries to: shadowpeoplebook@gmail.com.